The Valuable Inefficiencies of Cities
The best solutions to problems aren’t always the most obvious. This is why we value creative…
Continue reading »Category: Complex Systems
The Valuable Inefficiencies of Cities
The best solutions to problems aren’t always the most obvious. This is why we value creative…
Continue reading »The Valuable Inefficiencies of Cities
The best solutions to problems aren’t always the most obvious. This is why we value creative…
Continue reading »The Valuable Inefficiencies of Cities
The best solutions to problems aren’t always the most obvious. This is why we value creative…
Continue reading »Time for a new smart cities narrative.
It is a good thing that a growing chorus is calling for a more nuanced discussion of the narratives…
Continue reading »Time for a new smart cities narrative?
A growing chorus is calling for a more nuanced discussion of the narratives applied to smart cities…
Continue reading »Time for a new smart cities narrative?
A growing chorus is calling for a more nuanced discussion of the narratives applied to smart cities…
Continue reading »Time for a new smart cities narrative?
A growing chorus is calling for a more nuanced discussion of the narratives applied to smart cities…
Continue reading »A Framework for Agent-based Model Design
Model design is one of the most important stages of the development of any agent-based model. Get the design wrong and you might find yourself tied up in knots, battling against the structure of the project you defined months before. Get it right and you’ll leave yourself a extensible platform to develop into, allowing yourself …
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More on Urban Science
Social physics, scaling, urban informatics, energy in cities are all elements of a science of cities. The recent article by Solecki, Seto, and Marcotullio ‘It’s Time for an Urbanization Science’ in the magazine Environment develops yet another notion of what … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Dangermond Lecture
Today/this date I give/gave the Dangermond Lecture at University of California Santa Barbara on Explaining the Dynamics of City Size. Here is the PDF and there is a post on the CASA web site with more links to related work, … Continue reading →
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Identifying Communities in Traffic Flow
Edit: See new Central London image below! One recent bit of research I have been working on has been looking at the application of community detection algorithms to traffic flow in London. The idea is that within the traffic system exist a number …
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Urban Transformations and Urban Structure
Check out Luc D’Acci’s Blog. He has some very interesting projects on mega cities and the internal structure of cities which blends lots of ideas from economics and complexity theory with spatial structures and patterns. Some papers are downloadable
Continue reading »CAMUSS: Cellular Automata Modelling for Urban Spatial Systems
This interesting meeting is being held in Oporto, Portugal and involves a reassessment of progress and problems in this field of simulation. I am giving the keynote at 2-30pm November 8th -19th and the pdf of my power point can … Continue reading →
Continue reading »About CA Modelling
Amin Tayyebi, a Graduate Research Assistant in the Department of Forestry and Natural Resources at Purdue University, asked me to make a short (<5 minute) movie about Cellular Automata Modelling so that he could put it into a series about … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The Urban Morphology Lab
Someone from ETH Zurich Future Cities Lab showed me a fascinating book by Serge Salat called Cities and Forms (Hermann Editions, Paris, 2011). Haven’t managed to get it (ugh! French Publishers!) but downloaded his paper “Systemic Resilience of Complex Urban Systems: … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Complexity, Waste, Cities
Singapore World Cities Summit, Singapore WasteMetAsia sessions, today. Talking on how complexity theory can be used to think about waste in cities – of course it can be used to think about anything in cities, but here are some improvised … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Peter Hall’s 80th Birthday Symposium
Today and tomorrow (June 26-27) in the Darwin Lecture Theatre at UCL, there is a celebration of Peter’s work: Peter Hall and the Planning Imagination. Here’s the program. Here is my own contribution on complexity and planning.
Continue reading »The Laws of the City
A deluge of data makes cities laboratories for those seeking to run them better. Nice summary from Ludwig Siegele in this week’s Economist, online version I think. Merging smart cities and new scaling laws. And reference to the forthcoming meeting … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Crowds, Congestion and Extreme Events
My talk at CPGIS this morning is about how we might use all our new flow data to build new models to explore how city systems fail. This is more a talk about what we would like to do, rather … Continue reading →
Continue reading »The City as a Scalable Network
Geoff West of the Santa Fe Institute talks about scaling, networks and cities, emphasizing that cities scale more than proportionately with respect to creative pursuits, inventions, patents, specialist services and income. Watch the video on YouT…
Continue reading »Modelling Movement in the City: The Influence of Individuals
‘Modelling Movement in the City: The Influence of Individuals’ was the title of a talk I gave at the AGILE conference in Avignon, France last week. For the conference I actually initially prepared a poster that never ended up seeing the light of d…
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Complexity Theories of Cities Have Come of Age
A new book on complexity and cities edited by Juval Portugali, Han Meyer, Egbert Stolk and Ekim Tan with the intriguing title that what we do has come of age. Well maybe, maybe not, I leave you to be the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Satellite Meeting at ECCS 2012: Complexity in Spatial Dynamics
Satellite Meeting: Complexity in Spatial Dynamics (COSMIC) Location: Brussels, 5th of September 2012 Organizers: Peter Nijkamp, Michael Batty, Stewart Fotheringham, and Emmanouil Tranos Background New bottom up, digital data collected for entire populations, has started being utilised in urban science …
Continue reading »The City Size Debate Goes on Forever
Brian Berry has followed up his Cities as Systems within Systems of Cities paper published in 1964 in the Papers & Proceedings of the Regional Science Association with a great review of the city size debate in Current Research in … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Města, komplexita a vznikající řád
Well I only know what it means because others translated it for me – click left image for it in Czech and here for it in English as I posted it once before as Cities, Complexity and Emergent Order. The … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Complexity in Regional Science: The Alonso Lecture
Here is my lecture given at the North American Regional Science Association Annual Conference in Miami, 11th Nov 2011. It is as good a summary as I can muster of complexity theory applied to cities & regions. I focus on … Continue reading →
Continue reading »More Complexity: What von Neumann said to Shannon
Martin Austwick has an interesting piece on defining complexity which is what I am trying to do in my Spatial Complexity course. If you click on the link to the left or here, there is a small comment about entropy … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Spatial Complexity
Started my new lecture course on Spatial Complexity at Arizona State University. It’s killing me doing relatively new stuff day after day. Lectures are posted after given: Seven so far, the last on Wednesday (2/11) (at http://www.spatialcom…
Continue reading »The Complexity Brake
Paul Allen & Mark Greaves argue that the singularity that Ray Kurzweil amongst others are predicting within the next 30 years where AI & biomedicine merge and our species transforms, will not come to pass. This drama will be avoided by … Continue reading →
Continue reading »FuturICT
is a project led by ETH Zurich and UCL which deals with the simulation of highly interconnected coupled social systems characterised by extreme events and fast dynamics: i.e. things that go on in Cities. See it on Vimeo, explore the … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Frozen Accidents
Tweet Murray Gell-Mann says the “accumulation of frozen accidents is what gives the world its effective complexity.” These are events that define path dependence. The idea that a city is a sequence of accidents sharpens our sense of cities as patterns of … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Cities, Complexity, and Emergent Order
A short paper on key ideas that explain how patterns of urban morphology conceived in terms of networks and/or cells emerge from the bottom up and how cities restructure themselves in the same way. This tells in simple terms what this … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Dynamics of Urban Movement
Many interesting approaches were presented at Strathclyde Complex Transport Networks meeting this week, ranging from slime mould networks to more conventional transportation geometries. Our paper using London Oyster Card data can be downloaded from presentations on this site or by … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Emergence, What Is It?
A complex system is often defined as ‘emergent’ when some process generates unexpected, surprising and ordered outcomes. The classic exemplar is segregation in Schelling’s model. But there is strong, weak, first order, second order emergence. Click to read Nigel Gilbert’s … Continue reading →
Continue reading »How Big Can a City Get?
This question was rarely asked in the 20th century where the focus was on optimum city size. Now cities seemingly can grow forever but as Dobbs and Remes of McKinsey say, as they grow, cities become more ‘complex’. Managing this complexity … Continue reading →
Continue reading »Past Glimpses of Chaos, Complexity and Tipping Points
Great Talk by Paul Ormerod at Durham on Tipping Points in Financial Systems, quoting Keynes in 1937 who said: “Actually, however, we have, as a rule, only the vaguest idea of any but the most direct consequences of our acts.” Read … Continue reading →
The Urban Systems Collaborative
The Urban Systems Collaborative has just launched its blog – ideas about where a science of cities meets planning practice will emerge from this site. Note the focus on Smart Cities, Intelligent Cities, Paul Romer on Charter Cities. Good summary … Continue reading →
On Complexity
Nobel Prize Winner Herbert Simon said, in one of his last contributions: “The theory of complex systems is perhaps going to look more like biology, with its myriad of species and of proteins, than physics, with its overreaching generalizations.” Excellent … Continue reading →
Architecture in the Science of Cities
A significant movement in architecture deals with complexity theory with strong resonance to a science of cities. In 2004, the journal Katarxis Nº 3 reported this new wave with extracts from the writings of Jacobs, Salingaros, and Alexander.
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